New arrivals

This week's babies:

scarlet runner

We have a Scarlet Runner bean.  Yay!  The wait was not as long as I had thought it would be.

san marzano tomato

It is literally a pain in the neck to search for emerging tomatoes.  However, I doubt if it is much more than a week since fruits began forming on any of our tomato plants.  Every variety planted has some now, which is a wonder since some are supposed to be earlier than others.  Not all individual plants are bearing fruit yet.  The greenhouse San Marzano just grows more luminous green foliage.  It might need a little more stress.

early ear of corn - dazzling in the morning sun

We turned our backs on the garden for two days and returned to find several tufts of silk erupting from the corn stalks.  This is exciting, given my poor track record with corn.  The plants are also the largest I have ever grown, with the tips of the flowers already up to (don't laugh) my shoulder.

strawberry offspring

This was a little more than a week ago.  The strawberries seem to have shut down fruit production in favour of sending out runners, a great confusing tangle of them, in fact.  Where feasible, I cleared away the mulch to help the plant find a place to root.  Still, I pressed 26 of them into small containers with potting mix, and might yet do some more.  Many of these young plants are destined to live in other beds; using pots will cause less root disturbance for them when it's time to move.







On the menu:

We have recently added Maxibel fillet beans and Orca beans to our 50 foot diet.  Last night Barry made a delicious pesto using our basil, garlic, and beets greens (plus imported ingredients).  The beet roots are waiting for a suitable time to be steamed to the succulent tenderness we achieved with the last batch.  The garlic was not a clove but a small spherical bulb that had grown from a bulbil planted last fall.  We will harvest these sparingly until the regular bulbs are ready.

Every day we shell a pile of pea pods.  Can hardly keep up with eating them.  The snow peas aren't doing so well in the heat, but we keep them alive so they can produce again when the days cool down.

Though the strawberries are almost fruitless right now, we have had three from the new yellow alpine strawberry.  It's difficult to tell when they are ripe.  Raspberries have taken over the fruit supply nicely.  One variety is waning, while another plumper variety is coming on stream.

We cooked up a mess of parsnips last weekend.  It's not traditional parsnip harvesting time, but these were getting to be a bit of trouble.  A couple of them appeared to be inhibiting a Tigerella tomato plant.  Others were too big to live in the pathways and some were giving aid and comfort to the enemy - sow thistle.

Recent discovery - radish pods are edible.  We find they are better raw than cooked, better young than old.  This is excellent news, since we have never been able to grow radish roots in the summer.  Now we can relax while they bolt and enjoy the pods instead.

Still eating zucchini.

"What's Goin' On" and on

carrots with onion buffer, plus rogue dill and parsnip

Don't plant carrots and parsnips together, says The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.  These warnings don't tend to define "together" very well.  I try to put the bad companions in separate beds, but sometimes it isn't practical, so maybe I sow a row of lettuce (that great peacekeeper that is everyone's good companion) between the enemies and hope that's enough.  Both carrots and parsnips are comfortable with onions, ergo a double line of yellow onions between should stifle animosities.  This bed of carrots was sown sometime in April and has attained lush ferny tops.  In June I realized this was all I had planted for carrots (I wait to see what spaces are left after transplants and then forget) and started hunting around for small patches to sprinkle a few seeds - between tomatoes on the south edge of one of their beds and in the pea/bean/shallot bed, again placing a buffer (the carrots themselves this time) between two bad companions.  Just a few days ago I opened several packages of seeds of various varieties and ages and scattered them around the onions in the zucchini bed.  Besides these, there are a few volunteers around.  Like the parsnips, some might be in their second year.

corn and carrot flowers

Last fall I did leave one patch of tiny carrots to become this year's seed carrots.  They are huge and already flowering, dwarfing the adjacent corn stalks.  We have grown corn three times in the past and have had one or two good ears in all.  It's not the region - Taber, 50 km away, is famous for it's corn.  It has a Corn Fest in August.  I have gap-toothed corn and earwigs.  Too stingy with the fertilizer, perhaps?  Apparently unable to learn from past experience, I am again growing corn, with the seed variety that didn't work out before.  A vacant garden space with no plan for it, a box of leftover seeds (I can't just throw out perfectly good hybrid seeds) - what could be the harm?  It looks good so far, though already leaning from the high winds.

sunchokes

Sunchokes are already at shoulder height and leaning out into the pathway from one of their beds.  That group is so thick I have given up searching for weeds.  It might be just a solid block of tubers below the surface when we start digging them up.  I look forward to seeing how tall the stalks get this year.  The plants in the other bed, the former everlasting sweet pea bed, are the same height, not quite as dense.  Sweet peas keep trying to regain their place and I keep pulling off whatever growth I see.  Now that the sunchokes are getting bigger, though, the sweet peas will find they can get a lot further undetected.

raspberry thicket

As for fruits:
Haskap berries were tart and delicious and are now done for the season.  I prefer the larger berries of the short Cinderella variety and wish it would grow into a bigger bush.  It does have a rooting pot on it, so I hope to have a successful clone plant by the end of the summer.  There are also two rooting pots on the Berry Blue and one on the new Borealis.  The latter should be removed because the branch has clearly perished.
The first ripe strawberry was spotted June 15 and the first raspberry June 28.  There is a big feed of raspberries to come, if we dare enter the thorny mess that has developed.  The task becomes more intrepid when bees are pollinating flowers of the later variety of berry.  No Nanking cherries, no apples, no pears.  We don't know why.  Very sad.  The forecast for grapes is still good, as long as Barry can hold off the hordes of hoppers.

thyme and sage, and chamomile

A few small sage and thyme plants started in 2011 were uprooted from their original location and placed between the chives and walking onions last fall.  All survived the winter and are flowering now.  Some chamomile seeds have landed in the same area and will be allowed to grow as long as the flowers are not in the way; we don't want to risk stepping on bees in the pathways.  Dill is again everywhere.  I went on umbel patrol three days ago and will have to make another round today, even removing entire plants.  Cilantro self seeded itself generously last year.  It's a fragrant stroll past that bed as the leaves release an aroma from the lightest touch.  Somewhere on the interweb was a suggestion to freeze herbs in olive oil in ice cube trays.  Worth a shot.  A new herb for us this year is rosemary.  One year I started rosemary from seed and always had difficulty finding it after transplant  because it stayed so small.  This year I again started with seeds, but cleverly placed them in a large pot instead of the ground.  The two are still less than an inch tall, but they won't be accidentally weeded.  Nevertheless, we picked up a larger plant, maybe eight inches tall, at Greenhaven, to fill a container vacancy (the store was out of tomatoes and cucumbers at that point).  It's a "tender perennial".  Guess we'll find out how tender next spring.

garden cress going to seed

Miscellaneous:
Rhubarb is viable on the boulevard, though not nearly as large as it was when it lived by the water tank overflow in one of the sunniest parts of the back garden.  The two uprootings may not have helped.
Lettuce has been great, but is reaching for the sky.  More has been sown, in faint hope of tender summer leaves.  Cress bolted ages ago, yet it looks lovely leaning against the squash ladder with its tiny white flowers.  I just can't remove it yet.

giant self-seeded radishes

Radishes planted early in the front yard went straight to seed.  Those few planted among the peas in back have been fine.  A couple of volunteers dug up in the tomato bed are outstanding.





Have I covered all the edibles now?